Are there any pagers that use emacs keybindings?

Both more and less seem to be heavily influenced by the vi commands. Are there any pagers that are more emacs like out of the box?

apgwoz

Posted 2012-10-11T04:36:46.963

Reputation: 163

Answers

less supports actually a subset of both vi and emacs commands. You should be able to add the ones you are missing using the lesskey command.

jlliagre

Posted 2012-10-11T04:36:46.963

Reputation: 12 469

The lesskey pointer is very helpful--thanks! – apgwoz – 2012-10-11T18:10:26.693

Not exactly a pager, but GNU Info uses the same bindings as Emacs.

Though I wonder why you would need a pager if you use Emacs…

Emacs can browse man pages with woman, you can « tail » a file with auto-revert-tail-mode.

Daimrod

Posted 2012-10-11T04:36:46.963

Reputation: 553

You use pagers for a lot more than man and info pages... – apgwoz – 2012-10-11T18:15:56.517

My shell run in emacs and if I need to do complex operations on the output, I can simply put it in a buffer and write some elisp, run some shell command (M-|) or use some keyboard macros (C-x k (). Thus I only use a pager when I'm don't have (my) emacs. – Daimrod – 2012-10-11T21:25:37.383

Which shell are you using? I guess I could force myself to do more things within emacs. I already do do a lot of things. I'm just so used to using an xterm I guess... – apgwoz – 2012-10-12T02:11:48.007

I use multi-term to run multiple terminals inside emacs. https://github.com/daimrod/Emacs-config/blob/master/config-multi-term.el And then, you can switch between term-char-mode and term-line-mode with respectively C-c C-k and C-c C-j. term-char-mode has the standard term bindings, and with term-line-mode you can navigate in the buffer like in any other buffers.

– Daimrod – 2012-10-12T06:14:41.720

I've used multi-term in the past, but stopped for some reason--not sure why, but perhaps it's time to try again. My config is here: https://github.com/apgwoz/emacs-config

– apgwoz – 2012-10-12T11:54:52.347

I use this bash function to view files (from memory):

ev() {
  emacs "$1" -nw --eval '(setq buffer-read-only t)'
}

It opens the file $1 in a read only buffer.
I don't know the best way to set a bash function as a pager, I suppose you could put it in a shellscript instead and use that as pager instead.

(Not on a computer with bash to test on)

Nifle

Posted 2012-10-11T04:36:46.963

Reputation: 31 337

or add -Q - that also reduces the startup time quite a bit by not loading any customizations or distro-provided packages. – user45469 – 2016-10-19T18:49:35.063

Yeah, it'd be trivial to convert this to a shell script. I'd probably use emacsclient though to avoid the hefty startup time. – apgwoz – 2012-10-11T18:11:22.013